The racket of IBM Selectrics in typing class? The square holes of data cards? (I can’t even type phrase that without hearing it in my Indian college professor’s voice.) Did you – or if you’re old enough, your parents – collect grocery receipts for Apple IIe computers? Mario Typing? Channel One?

It’s a history of promises and utopia, isn’t it? Promises of:

Individualized, self-paced learning

Global connections and awareness

Classroom and system efficiency

Parent-school cooperation

Financial savings

Preparedness for the workplace and the modern world in general.

How much has been written on these issues? Millions of words. I don’t want to add too much to that. What I have to say is particularly directed at Catholic education, which, in this country, has – not surprisingly – jumped right on the Tech Train, seeking, as it does it so much else, to do nothing more than ape public education.

The lack of critical, counter-cultural thinking in Catholic education is not surprising, but still continually disappointing nonetheless.

What I have to say today is pretty simple, and I’m going to say it mostly by quoting from others. I’d encourage you to follow the links and read more.

Bottom line:

The push for screens and internet-based learning to replace books and paper is sold to us as an inevitability that is, of course, best for students.

I invite you to never, ever, accept that premise, and to question it, from top to bottom every time it’s presented to you.

Because the push for screens and internet-based learning is not about students. It’s about profit and data.

Let’s go back to the dark ages – the 1990’s, when Channel One entered classrooms. It’s an instructive example because it was so controversial at the time, and what’s happening now with computer-based learning, particularly Google Classroom, raises similar issues, but does not seem to be raising the same kinds of questions.

The deal was this: Whittle Communications provided classroom televisions and satellite receivers to schools in exchange for schools having their students watch a daily news show provided by the company – called Channel One. I taught in a school that took this deal, and yes, every day after opening prayer and the Pledge of Allegiance, we had to watch this – what, maybe 10-15 minute news show with advertisements (that was the controversial part).

As I said – it was controversial – accusations of schools selling out students, forcing them to watch advertisements and whatever editorial slant Channel One offered in its programming.

And those are questions that should have been raised. It was certainly problematic – not to speak of being a pain and an intrusion. But hey! We got free televisions!

What’s happening now is no different – well, it is different – because it’s worse. What’s happening now in so many systems is an unquestioning, eager acceptance of faulty premises about what’s best for students, allowing tech companies to simply take over education, set the standards, and dominate every aspect of the process from pre-assessment, to instruction, to testing to information infrastructure.

And all the while scraping your kids’ lives for data.

Tomorrow I’m going to take the issue on from a more personal perspective, ranting about sharing various experiences my own kids have had with this in their classrooms – since I haven’t taught myself since the advent of intensive, intrusive classroom tech – in my day – it was a big deal to get one classroom computer, period.

Today, I’m just going to leave you with some citations from other writers. I don’t agree with everything every one of these writers have to say about every issue – some of them tend to tilt definitely more leftward than I do, and many are hard-core opposed to charter and private schools – but on these matters, I’m indebted to their passion.

Here’s where I stand – before I get to the links:

Education – even up through high school – should be as screen-free as possible. I really don’t see any reason at all for elementary students to use computers or screens. Their brains need the holistic connection between mental and physical activity that comes with reading real books and writing on paper and using concrete manipulatives.

Everything I have read indicates that reading retention is stronger from reading from printed paper pages than it is reading from a screen. There is an aspect to spatial awareness that assists in retention. I know this is true for me because I can often, when trying to remember something I read, can retrieve it by thinking about where I read it on the page – top, bottom, middle. I don’t have that with a screen, which is why the only books I read on an e-reader are out-of-print books I can’t find anywhere else, for the most part. For sure, if I am reading non-fiction – serious history or theology – I must read a book – I must be able to have that experience of holding something physical in my hands, flipping back and forth, physically highlighting.

Anecdotal evidence suggests that students tend to prefer printed material, as well: “real books.” There are serious questions, as well, about the physical impact of all-day screen immersion, not only on brain chemistry and attention, but on other aspects of our physical health.

As the links below will emphasize, this is mostly about perceived financial savings (by schools and systems) and financial gain (by corporations). It is disappointing, as I said, to see Catholic schools buy into this.

Classroom tech does not improve efficiency. At all. It takes time to learn, there are bugs and disruptions, the Internet goes out, the power goes out, it presents distractions.

While there are great teachers out there, teachers as a group are not noble saints immune from human weakness. As I said, great teachers still work out there – my children are sitting in the classrooms of some excellent teachers as I write this. But – again – teachers are not saints or superhuman or uniformly excellent. There are lazy, inefficient, ignorant teachers whose worst habits are encouraged by classroom tech. I mean – who among us hasn’t encountered the teacher who does nothing more than hand out worksheets? Now he/she has a classroom full of kids who can be told to work in their Chromebooks and call it a day.

So yeah – basically, for me, it comes down to : The tech needed in a classroom is going to vary: kids studying AP Physics might need to use it more than they do in English class (or maybe not – I sort of have my doubts on that score, too). But the presumption should be: less tech is better.

I know. Some of you have no choice. You live in a state or district where teacher autonomy is a pathetic joke. There are ways to fight that, but they’re probably not in the classroom.

It’s not you who I’m talking to. I’m addressing everyone else. I’m talking to all the teachers out there who DO have some modicum of control over their own classrooms and who are told by their administrators to do things that they honestly disagree with – but they do it anyway.

They call this trash “personalized learning.” How can it really be personalized if kids do the same exercises just at different rates? How is it personalized if it’s standardized? How is it personalized if it omits the presence of actual people in the education process?

This is seen as a way to save money by teaching without teachers. Sure, you still need a certified educator in the class room (for now) but you can stuff even more children into the seats when the teacher is only a proctor and not responsible for actually presenting the material.

The teacher becomes more of a policeman. It’s his job to make sure students are dutifully pressing buttons, paying attention and not falling asleep.

That’s what the whole program consists of – forcing children to sit in front of computers all day at school to take unending high stakes mini-tests. And somehow this is being sold as a reduction in testing when it’s exactly the opposite.

This new initiative is seen by many corporate school reformers as the brave new world of education policy. The public has soundly rejected standardized tests and Common Core. So this is the corporate response, a scheme they privately call stealth assessments. Students will take high stakes tests without even knowing they are doing it. They’ll be asked the same kinds of multiple-choice nonsense you’d find on state mandated standardized assessments but programmers will make it look like a game. The results will still be used to label schools “failing” regardless of how under-resourced they are or how students are suffering the effects of poverty. Mountains of data will still be collected on your children and sold to commercial interests to better market their products.

Parents, here’s the moral of the story: if you want your child “constantly interacting” with whatever corporate testing company your state has contracted with, and if you trust that company to be your child’s teacher, then by all means, CBE is for you.

Dr. Kentaro Toyama, an associate professor at the University of Michigan’s School of Information, once believed that technology in the classroom could solve the problems of modern urban education. No Luddite, he had received his Ph.D. in computer science from Yale and had moved to India in 2004 to help found a new research lab for Microsoft; while there, he became interested in how computers, mobile phones and other technologies could help educate India’s billion-plus population.

Rather than finding a digital educational cure, he came to understand what he calls technology’s “Law of Amplification”: technology could help education where it’s already doing well, but it does little for mediocre educational systems. Worse, in dysfunctional schools, it “can cause outright harm.” He added: “Unfortunately, there is no technological fix…more technology only magnifies socioeconomic disparities, and the only way to avoid that is non-technological.”

What this discussion boils down to is a concern about student learning and a skepticism regarding the idea that technology is always necessary or appropriate. New tech tools might promote engagement, but students might also enjoy colorful pens and giant pieces of chart paper as a change of pace in environments that are proudly, and rigidly, paperless. Virtual discussion boards might be crucial for drawing out introverted students; they might also give students permission to sit back and type canned responses.

In his 2003 book The Flickering Mind, author Todd Oppenheimer argued that education technology had failed in its promise to transform education and that it may paradoxically impede learning. Oppenheimer, a journalist who visited a range of schools and institutions in the United States to examine how technology was shaping education, found that educators often conflated sleek but content-thin presentations with evidence of deep learning.

Educators also erroneously assumed that the use of tools like PowerPoint counted as relevant skill-building for the workplace. Oppenheimer suggests in the book that students are more likely to prosper if they develop “strong values and work habits,” and master “the art of discussion.”

I am probably going to regret this, since by tomorrow something else will have popped up that I’d rather write about, or I’ll feel overwhelmed by All The Thoughts, but I’m going to go ahead and commit to this: a week’s full of posts about tech – by which I mean, not the engine on your Toyota or the microwave, but, of course, information technology. That Damn Internet.

I’m calling it Tech Week. Those of you involved in the theater (I’m not) know Tech Week as Hell. It’s the series of rehearsals in which all of the technological aspects of the production – mostly lighting and sound – are painstakingly worked out. It’s painful, but necessary, and here, more than a useful pun. The process of putting all of that into place is difficult – but that tech is at the service of something very human: real flesh and blood people telling a story to other real flesh and blood people.

The question that’s at hand is not unrelated: what does modern information technology do to our humanity? Are we enslaved – or is there any way that it can be managed so that it serves us and helps us tell our stories more powerfully to each other?

Is it hopeless?

I’m not a philosopher, so these thoughts will be my usual fly-by-night stream-of-consciousness nonsense. I’ll try to keep it all as succinct as I can – which is why I’m dividing it up into different posts:

Monday: Some…thoughts.

Tuesday: Churches, evangelization and technology

Wednesday: Education and tech – the basics

Thursday: Education and tech – specific issues

Friday: What all of this brings out of us: the worst and the best

A couple of years ago, I reread Fahrenheit 451 as my son tackled it for Freshman English. I was quite taken with it. It struck me not so much as book About Censorship, as it’s usually thought of, but a book about Powers absorbing the individual – about making the individual believe that nothing in her life as she is living it today in this real world of earth and sky is as interesting as what is being presented on an ever-present, all-enveloping screen or fed into her earbuds.

Inspired by that, I decided to pull out an ancient paperback copy of Marshal McLuhan’s Understanding Media. I’d read it and then pull Bradbury and McLuhan together to make some brilliant commentary on The Present Day. That’s what I was going to do.

Well, honestly – I couldn’t make head nor tail of McLuhan. I couldn’t keep track of the hot-coldstuff, partly because I kept trying to translating into the present day, and it just didn’t work. Mostly I am just not philosophically-minded and can’t follow arguments like this, just like I could never keep track of the characters in Deadwood. It’s a similar problem: everything just melds together: men with big moustaches spouting profanities – long sentences about structuring and configuring and vantage points – I just get hopelessly lost.

To be sure, there are brilliant nuggets in Understanding Media that I’ll be quoting, but I am not sure whatever it is he is arguing still works as an argument. Circumstances have changed so quickly, and the shape of media is quite different.

For there are two things, it seems to me, that Bradbury, McLuhan, Orwell, Huxley and most other visionaries of that era missed about “The Future.” They envisioned information technology that would be able to dominate populations and shape culture and society: manipulative images on large screens, voices in earphones, an unrelenting, controlling Presence.

What could they not see?

First, the role that non-government entities would play in creating and maintaining that pervasive presence. The assumption, naturally enough, is that only government would have the power or interest in controlling information, communication and images, but we see that’s not the case. It’s an extremely profitable enterprise, and while corporations and governments are certainly all in this together for their own motivations, feeding off each other, the Google-Apple-Amazon-Microsoft regime is also different than the authoritarian single-government Big Brother that’s the framework for so much of mid-to-late 20th century prognostications.

Secondly – and this is what intrigues me the most. What hardly anyone envisioned (although those of you more well-read than I can certainly correct me on this score!) was the shrinking of the technology to the point that what kids carry around in their pockets is exponentially more powerful than computers that filled rooms just a couple of decades ago and – even more importantly – this tech gives not only the power to see and hear, but to create.

It didn’t take much to envision a future in which every corner of our lives would feature a screen. The plot twist has been the camera, microphone, printing press and projector that everyone holds in their hands.